Macron “accepts all but three” of the CCC’s 149 recommendations

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Yoram Gat

RFI reports:

A day after a powerful push by the Greens in French municipal elections, President Emmanuel Macron on Monday vowed to speed up environmental policies – promising an extra €15 billion to fight global warming over the next two years, and throwing his support behind two referendums on major climate policy.

Macron was responding to proposals put forward by the 150-member Citizens Climate Convention (CCC), a lottery of French people chosen to debate and respond to the climate challenges facing society.

During a meeting in the gardens of the Elysée Palace, Macron told convention members that he accepted all but three of their 149 recommendations which would, he promised, be delivered to parliament “unfiltered”.
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Feertchak: The Citizen Convention for the Climate does not meet with unanimity

Posted on June 27, 2020 by Yoram Gat

With the Citizen Convention on the Climate publishing its report, Alexis Feertchak writes in the Le Figaro about early reactions.

The Citizen Convention for the Climate does not meet with unanimity
June 20th, 2020

The 150 allotted citizens are voting this weekend for as many environmental proposals. But since its introduction, reactions to this body have been mixed.

“Involve citizens in the governance of transportation at the local level as well as at the national level.” The “technical” tone of this proposal makes it sound more like a recommendation in report of the state bureaucracy than a conclusion of a citizen assembly chosen by lot. It is one of the points that are regularly made on the social networks: if we involve citizens directly in democratic deliberation, we should have been able to get more original results than that one.

Rather than being original, the 150 proposals or so, showing a leftist slant economically, seem quite familiar. Responding to the proposal of reducing the work week to 28 hours (a proposal that was eventually not presented), increasing the minimum wage, taxing dividends, etc., Philippe Bas, senator for [the center-right party] Les Républicains and head of the laws committee, twitted: “The results of the so-called citizen convention are a disappointment: a rehashing of the hymn book of the environmental lobby, (…) economic ignorance, total lack of legitimacy. Sortition exposed as a democratic deception!”
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Wachtel: Let’s Choose Legislators Randomly from the Phone Book

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Ted Wachtel is the founder of a political organization called “Building A New Reality“. He is a sortition advocate.

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Let Legislative Juries Decide Laws

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Simon Threlkeld

In a new article in Dissident Voice I explain how laws can be decided by legislative juries, and why this is far preferable to laws being decided by elected politicians and the ballot initiative. This is an update and further statement of the legislative juries proposal I first published in 1998. I set out four ways in which I am in favour of laws being proposed to legislative juries, my preferred approach to deciding the details and arrangements for jury lawmaking, and some of the role agenda juries can play.

It would be far better and far more democratic if laws are decided by legislative juries rather than by elected politicians.

Legislative juries would decide proposed laws by majority vote, using secret ballot, after a fair hearing on a level playing field with supporters and opponents of the proposed law having equal time to present their case to the jury.

It is essential that rule by the people be exercised in an informed manner, including with regard to deciding laws, because informed views are a far better basis for a decision than poorly informed and uninformed views.

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Massol: Participative democracy: a job for professionals

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Nicolas Massol writes in Liberation.

Participative democracy: a job for professionals

The growth of citizen participation initiatives, such as the Climate Convention, has been made possible thanks to a lot of organizational work by specialized businesses.

Participative democracy is not a business for amateurs. To be convinced of that, it is enough to have a look at the sophisticated organization of the Climate Convention. All this beautiful engineering was designed and put together by professionals of citizen participation. For them this unprecedented experience is going to usher in a profession of a future. It is a future which has been in the making for 20 years in which, from participative budgeting to a Grand national debate, initiatives for directly involving citizens in political decision-making have been growing, with the support of the authorities. “Municipalities account for 80% of the initiatives”, estimates Alice Mazeaud, co-author of “The market of participative democracy” (2018). The Convention, on the other hand, was financed directly by the Prime Minister’s office, to the tune of over 4 million Euros. Not enough to speak of a real “participation business”, but still enough to create a small ecosystem.

And so, the organization of the Convention was handed to a consortium of businesses: The Harris Interactive polling institute carried out the allotment, Eurogroup Consulting set up the database available to the citizens, and for moderating the discussions, Res Publica and Missions publiques – two consulting firms for participative democracy – were hired. “My profession is to make sure the collective discussion advances”, says Gilles-Laurent Rayssac, the president of the first of those. A technical role, according to Judith Ferrando, the co-director of the second one: “Our moderation techniques promote the success of deliberation, but we stay in the wings, a little like in the theater.”
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Allotted body to advise the German SPD

Posted on June 20, 2020 by Yoram Gat

The German SPD party announced that an allotted body advising party leadership has met for the first time. The body has 20 people, randomly drawn for one year of service among party members. The newspaper Die Welt has interviews with four of the members.

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The Bundestag gives sortition a spin

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Ahmed Teleb wrote to point to the following Tweet thread.

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Táíwò: Power over the police

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Yoram Gat

In the context of the recent mass outrage over the murder of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò of the Pan-African Community Action reiterates the proposal made by Max Rameau to enforce citizen control over police via allotted citizen boards.

The core problem with policing and incarceration is the same problem that plagues our whole political system: elite capture. The laws, the regulations, the bailouts, and the wonks who write and evaluate all of the above are all powerfully influenced—if not functionally controlled—by elite political and corporate interests. We cannot put our faith in elected representatives and merely vote our way out of this problem: elections are more dominated by dollars than ever, and grassroots energy around political figures is increasingly shaped by identity politics, which faces its own elite capture problem.

Instead, we need to give power back to the people—directly. Under one specific proposal, offered by the Washington, D.C.–area group Pan-African Community Action (of which I’m a member), communities would be divided into districts, each of which would be empowered to self-determine how to maintain public order. Each district would hold a plebiscite to decide what to do with its current police department, immediately giving the community the direct voting power to abolish, restructure, downsize, or otherwise reconstruct their departments.
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Rotation; The Stabilizer of Random Selection

Posted on June 15, 2020 by johnedwardtaylor

This is the 4th post in a series on Barbara Goodwin’s classic work on sortition Justice by Lottery, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992. Previous posts in the series: 1, 2, 3.

Barbara Goodwin’s main concern in Justice by Lottery is to examine how a purely sortition-dominated economy, in the form of what she calls a “total social lottery”, might aid in establishing greater justice and equality. However, she does introduce another technique that grew up at the same time as sortition did in Ancient Athens, that of rotation. Rotation of positions there was assured by default, it seems, simply by establishing term limits and stipulating that a given post can be only held once by any given citizen in their lifetime. Goodwin treats sortition and rotation as so closely compatible that she sometimes treats them as a single process, sortition-rotation. Whereas sortition, run by the cleroterion device, assigns posts at random, rotation assures that all the necessary bases are covered. She explains,

Rotation is not the same as pure chance: it pays some attention to people’s desire for a guaranteed supply of certain things. By contrast, the lottery is based on the idea that surprise and risk are themselves a major part of what people desire. But there could be room in a transformed society for both principles, and they could operate in harmony – unlike, say, rotation and the principle of entitlement. If we could ensure that people’s basic needs were securely satisfied and that highly specialized jobs (which carry their own rewards in terms of work satisfaction) were appropriately filled, there would be sound reasons for distributing non-specialized jobs and scarce goods above a guaranteed minimum via a modified lottery system or by rotation, especially in the case of scarce luxuries. This would add to the spice of life. Such a system would mitigate the two major kinds of social injustice which the ineradicable inequalities in the structure of advanced capitalist societies, combined with the inelasticity of supply of some goods, produce – for example:
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Testart on democracy, democratic debate and citizen power, Part 1

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Jacques Testart, a prominent French biologist, is a long-time advocate for citizen power, especially as it concerns control of science-related issues. His work in this area stretches back decades. In 2002 Testart co-founded the Association for Citizen Sciences. In a 2017 interview (Le Comptoir, Part 1, Part 2), parts of which are translated below, Testart discusses democracy, public debate, and citizen control of science.

Science, such as economics, could be a carrier of truth because of its neutrality. However, among other examples, the basic axiom of the Work Law forced through, against the opinion of millions of workers affected, rests on a certain “scientific” concept of economics. This law is a good demonstration that this supposed neutrality which economics maintains is in fact such in the eyes of the minority in power alone. When the social contract is under stress, when the decision-makers prefer Capital over the people, it may be necessary to try and consider about how it is put together, in order to be able to improve democracy. Jacques Testart, formerly a research biologist and “father” of the first French test-tube baby, now devotes his time to this goal, notably through the Association for Citizen Sciences. With this in mind, he has recently published “Rêveries d’un chercheur solidaire“, “L’humanitude au pouvoir – Comment les citoyens peuvent décider du bien commun” and “Faire des enfants demain“. We went to meet him. In the first part we discussed the collapse of democracy, in which the flag barriers of Truth are thoroughly involved. The means for making democracy work are discussed in the second part.

Le Comptoir: We hear here and there that democracy is experiencing a “crisis” of representation. Due to the professionalization of politics, the elected are no longer (if they ever were) really representative of their voters, but are rather members of a political-media-financial oligarchy. What do you think?

Testart: That is obvious, yes. The problem is knowing if those who occupy the leadership circles are leaders or representatives. They consider themselves to be leaders because they are elected, and therefore have popular support. But originally, the rules of the game were aimed at – and things must get back to this – them being only representatives. They ability to initiate during their term should be limited by their initial mandate, accounting for unexpected developments. In no case should they be allowed to take decisions that do not conform to the promises for which they were elected. I believe this is a really fundamental point. It is this which dispirits a lot of people, politically, and leads them to abstain. It lead to the rise of the “everything is corrupt” attitude on which the extreme right prospers.

Le Comptoir: May we say that this crisis of representation is also due to an appalling lack of debate regarding issues regarding which there is a consensus among experts in media? I am thinking specifically regarding assisted reproductive technology and the barrage of articles published daily about new “advanced” technologies, presenting all manner of gadgets and announcing “revolutions” to come, from self-driving cars to the bionic prostheses.
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